7 highlights of this week's American Astronomical Society announcements

Few conferences can hope to compete with the epic announcements
of the American Astronomical Society.

This consortium of sky-watchers took to Texas from 8 to 12
January to talk thermonuclear supernovae, "circumbinary" planets,
the dual heart of the Andromeda galaxy and a black hole that spits
balls of gas into the cosmos.

The society revealed the discovery of new exoplanets,
photographs and answered a decades-old question on cosmic
explosions. Wired.co.uk has rounded up the highlights you shouldn't
miss.

The true colour of the Milky Way

What would the Milky Way look like to a distant alien
astronomer? It's hard for us to tell from the inside -- the Earth
is so deep within the galaxy that clouds of gas and dust obscure
all but the closest regions, preventing us from getting the big
picture.

A team of astronomers from the University of Pittsburgh borrowed
the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a catalogue that measures the
properties of nearly a million galaxies and has obtained color
images of roughly a quarter of the sky.

By relating the Milky Way to these galaxies -- with properties
like their total amount of stars and the rate at which they are
creating new stars -- a true colour was
found.

The Milky Way is "a very pure white, almost mirroring a fresh
spring snowfall," reveals Jeffrey Newman, Pitt professor of physics
and astronomy. Perhaps he should take up poetry?

The dual heart of the Andromeda galaxy

The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped the sharpest visible-light image of another galaxy's nucleus
(above). This stunning photograph reveals the
100-million-solar-mass black hole at the heart of the Andromeda
galaxy (M31), which is the closest galactic neighbour to our own
galaxy, and, incidentally, will one day collide with us.

We also clearly see the "double nucleus" of Andromeda, which
Hubble first discovered in 1992: a compact cluster of primordial
blue stars and an elliptical ring of old reddish stars.

Astronomers are trying to understand how such young blue stars
(200 million years old at max) were formed so deep inside the black
hole's gravitational grip, and how they survived adolescence in
such an extreme, violent environment.

More Tatooine-style twin star planets found

Back in September 2011, planet-hunter Kepler discovered an
exoplanet that bore resemblance to Luke Skywalker's home world of
Tatooine. Distant planet Kepler-16b would see two sunsets as it
orbits a pair of twin stars.

Turns out it's not such a rare occurrence. Astronomers from San
Diego State University used Kepler data to find Kepler-34 b and Kepler-35 b, two gaseous, Saturn-size
planets that each orbit a pair of stars. Both systems reside in the
constellation Cygnus, some 5,000 light years from Earth.

With three twin-star planets now found, the class of system has
even been given a name. "With this paper, the new field of
comparative circumbinary planetology is now established," said
Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute and lead-author of the
Kepler-16 discovery.

The cause of Type Ia supernovae discovered

What produces Type Ia supernovae (the kind that light up quickly
and smoothly, and dim faster than Type II supernovae)? For
astrophysicists it's as big a question as "is the Higg's Boson
real?" or "Where's Wally?". The progenitor of these tremendous
thermonuclear explosions -- stellar H-bombs that are brighter than
a whole galaxy -- has puzzled the astronomy community for
decades.

There have been two leading theories: a pair of white dwarfs
that spiral into each other and explode, or a companion star that
feeds mass into a nearby dwarf until it splinters at the sides and
errupts.

Louisiana State University professor of physics and astronomy
Bradley Schaefer used images from the Hubble Space Telescope of a
supernova remnant named SNR 0509-67.5 like forensic detectives
looking at a corpse. His team found no possible surviving companion
star, which meant that the only viable theory was a pair of white dwarfs.

"The logic here is the same as expressed by Sherlock Holmes in
that 'when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable, must be the truth,'" said Schaefer.

Comments

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